Just because you don’t like what happened doesn’t mean you can deny it happened. Five years on from the 2017 general election, the Labour leadership is in deep denial about that extraordinary result. It’s a bad place to be.
Back then, to everyone’s surprise – even his – Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership delivered the shock result of a 40% share of the vote. This was Labour’s 10th-highest ever poll, and its third largest vote share since 1970. Something happened half a decade ago and it’s important to unpick what.
Anyone who says something is all bad is nearly always all wrong. Corbynism, like all isms, was a mixed bag. Crucially, whatever you think of him and his project, it matters now that we understand the 2017 result happened for reasons that still pertain.
Corbynism was as hopeful as it was hopeless. From his 2015 leadership election victory to the following general election, it offered a screen on to which people, tired of both technocratic and insipid New Labour wannabies and austerity, projected their hopes and fears. People queued round the block to hear him speak and then voted for him in droves.
They did so because he spoke to a moment. Politics is about personality and policy, but what shifts its tectonic plates is material: the economic reality of good lives or premature deaths. This is especially true for what the lecturer in political economy Keir Milburn dubbed “generation left”, for whom Corbynism offered a moral and practical lifeline. For them, the dreary pact with capitalism of a life of relatively benign turbo-consumerism no longer held. They couldn’t get on the housing ladder or acquire a job that paid a pension. Laid low by student debt they had no skin in the neoliberal game, and so searched for another.
Off the back of ingenuous new political movements such as UK Uncut and Plane Stupid, the perfect wave met its sadly flawed surfer. Because Corbyn, for all his commitment and resolve, was never ever cut out for leadership. He never wanted to be leader and exhibited none of the skills for it. But people were desperate for hope and change. Like Tinkerbell trying to bring Peter Pan back to life, all you had to do was believe passionately enough and Corbynism would fly. The tension between this hope and gravitational reality lasted until polling day, 8 June, 2017. Then the fairytale exploded.
Looking back, the 40% result is more remarkable still, being recorded despite Corbyn’s own obvious limitations, a rightwing press that hounded him from day one, and even worse, rightwingers in the parliamentary Labour party who never ever accepted his legitimate mandate. Brazenly and outrageously, some even stated that they would rather lose under Corbyn than see the left win.
Their objective now is to seal the tomb and bury Corbynism for ever. But you can’t escape living breathing political reality and the material of the everyday, of struggle, of self- and mutual interest. Capitalism is broken, at least morally and quite possibly structurally. It survives only because of its economic and communicative clout.
But it survives too because a radical and yet feasible alternative has not yet been offered. Corbynism provided some material answers to the age of perma-crisis we live in. Policies are necessary, but so too are professionalism and pluralism. Corbyn seemed uninterested in effective management of the party, let alone the country. And he deployed the same old tired tribal politics Labourism has always offered, finding no place for the likes of Caroline Lucas or proportional representation. Indeed, a big chunk of his 2017 vote and seats came from the first Progressive Alliance campaign, in which scores of Green candidates stood aside and hundreds of thousands of voters backed him tactically. And yet, instead of thanking them, he arrogantly claimed all the support as his own. His was a monopoly socialism, wedded like all Labour leaders to the disciplining forces of first past the post.
Seemingly, the result went to Team Corbyn’s heads. Some even claimed they had “won”. So then they stacked policy upon policy, without addressing their professional or the pluralism defects. Unable to deal with Brexit or claims of antisemitism, it all came crashing down in 2019.
Why does this matter now? It matters because the economic turbulence that gave rise to Corbynism hasn’t subsided. The cost of living crisis is testament to this fact. Policies like rail and energy nationalisation today are just common sense, so too is a universal basic income. But Labour now rejects such ideas precisely because they are associated with Corbynism. Contrast this sour rejection with the way Olaf Scholz in Germany and Joe Biden in the US have both embraced the left of their parties and used the ideas energy to win.
Corbyn’s 40% of the vote, in its own distorted and complex way, helps show us what’s possible. Some want to bury it, some simply to repeat it, but the answer must be to learn from it, faults and all.
Because a new canvas of hope will be needed, one prepared to confront capital as much as the climate crisis, but through a far richer and deeper democratic settlement. The wave will keep rolling, looking for its next surfer, because leaders are always necessary. But who is going catch the wave and know it’s not about them but the power and energy beneath their feet?
• Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass
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